6 ms·

I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (an

I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic (and assembler and peek and poke). I remember being amazingly proud of myself for getting an ascii version of Space Invaders working. I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _literally_ the most desirable and sophisticated "computer game" there was at the time. I talk to a friend's 11 year old occasionally about "computer stuff", and he plays Fortnight and Roblox - and he just can't see a connection between simple child oriented computer programming, and Fortnight, which is what he would rather be playing than futzing around in Scratch (or even Minecraft). I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle, when they could be playing multiplayer games on their phone or iPad instead. (And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs, I did most of my Basic programming in junior high on a BBC Micro, because there were not games on pirated floppy disks, which was what the AppleIIs were all in demand for. I suspect today it'll still only be a half dozen or so kids out of a school of 6 or 800 who _want_ to program computers, same as it was in '79 and '80. The rest of them will just want to play games not learn how to do magic...) If you wanna give your kids the opportunity, I s3econd cons's suggestion of a RaspberryPi400. Add a spare HDMI monitor and you're got "the spiritual equivalent" of an AppleII. Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun.

Raminj95 5y ago
I have actually never thought of it like this, excellent answer!
tmm84 5y ago
I agree with this post. Most of the young 6-12 year olds out there aren't going to be really interested in a terminal/basic interpreter. A lot of what that audience wants to do is build mods for the games they play. Minecraft, fortnite, etc. and the like. But programming for these games is a bit more involved than regular programming obviously. I suggest getting them a computer that is capable of playing the game they like and helping them setup the environment for making mods (this is probably something young adults can do on their own but definitely not 6-12 year olds with little experience/patience). And, I think being there as the one learning it with them and understanding what is needed is going to help. I would highly suggest purchasing a book centered on minecraft modding or the like (they seem to be really popular at least the bookstore near me), as this will give you the knowledge to help your child(ren) make mods. I suggest the favorite game modding because it is something both the child and their friends will actually appreciate/use/play with.
- asddubs 5y ago
  minecraft modding is doable with some help. obviously more complex than writing some little BASIC program from scratch since you're hooking into existing things that are at times not ideally documented but it's a lot more feasible than trying to teach your kid unity, probably
  - bmj 5y ago
    There are plenty of tutorials available out there, with some geared toward kids with no programming experience. My older son went through a class (can't remember which one...it was at least six years ago) that did a very nice job of making basic Minecraft mods very accessible, while still introducing programming topics.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      plus it's java, so it's something they can actually carry on to use in the future, rather than some proprietary custom script language with wildly different syntax than anything else. it's even got strict typing!
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    the minecraft modding experience on the raspberry pi my pre-teen has is dead simple to get working, with a quick code-observe loop, but then there's a gap moving to java mods on the PC, which is much more involved
- fallat 5y ago
  Modding is actually an excellent catalyst to begin the programming path or other similar paths... Great suggestion!
- helen___keller 5y ago
  Agreed with modding. In the early aughts my dad encouraged me to learn basic but I was more into playing games and I didn’t see the connection to basic which seemed to me to be mostly about printing text. But at some point, my favorite game involved a scriptable server engine, and nothing brought me joy like updating the game that I had poured hundreds of hours into, with a simple line of text. After that I went back to mainstream games like WoW and didn’t do anything like programming again until college (minus an attempt at AP computer science which I dropped because it was boring)
amelius 5y ago
> Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun. Programming is mostly plumbing anyway, so if your kid chooses differently, that's very ok.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I sometimes think of it as interior decorating. I do a lot of frontend though.
kieckerjan 5y ago
> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs. Exactly. When I was a teenager in the 80's the kids in school came in three classes: the majority who did not know what computers were or thought they were lame, a minority who dabbled in the nascent gaming scene and an even smaller minority (of maybe 5 people in a school of 1500) that was interested in programming a computer. I happened to be part of the latter minority. The gamers were all about getting the newest (cracked) games as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we were cutting our teeth on the internals of the c64. While we were lousy gamers with zero connections, we had a certain amount of respect in the gamer community because we were actually capable of programming the intro's to their cracked games. In return we got to feed on their scraps, so there was a living in that. :-)
chalst 5y ago
Are you aware of Nintendo Game Builder Garage? [1,2] My youngest daughter was begging me to get this for her when it came out. She spent ages in earlier years trying to figure out doing stuff with the MIT Scratch offline editor. She's not super keen on text-based programming yet (my elder daughter is and solidly resists my typed FP propaganda in favour of hand-typed OO programming), but these kind of visual programming environments do teach real agent-based algorithmic concepts. I'm not saying your advice isn't better than something along these lines, but it's good to be flexible in terms of what advice you offer and be encouraging rather than prescriptive. [1]: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/game-builder-garage-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/game-builder-garage-sw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058300
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Playfool recently had a nice video with suggestions on how Game Builder Garage combines really well with earlier Labo kits. So if you have any of those lying around.. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJH11qXtys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJH11qXtys
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  I'm vicariously proud of your children :) Out of curiosity, how old are they, and when did you start them on programming related stuff? I have a 5yo and 7yo boy. The older one is just starting to develop an interest in creating things, and recently took an unsuccessful (but still educational) stab at learning Blender.
  - chalst 5y ago
    18 and 15. I started them on Scratch about 9 years ago, so your elder was about the same age as my younger when we started, and I kept coming back to its model to explain ideas about algorithms.
vnorilo 5y ago
My 7yo is absolutely thrilled by scratch on Lego Mindstorms Robot Innovator [1]. The physicality of it is engaging. Granted, I'm generally a very restrictive parent about mobile/console gaming. 1: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515
- bencollier49 5y ago
  I agree with this. I think robots are probably where it's at these days. Kids sometimes like the simplicity of the old computer games, but as mentioned above, the old excitement at having your hands on cutting edge tech isn't there with a Raspi, or an old retro computer.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  Agreed. Mobile gaming should absolutely be banned from kids. Most of the games out there were designed to be money-grabbing. Consoles are better especially if you give them a retro one as the first machine.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    You mean designed to get you to pay/watch ads gaming. There's lots of great mobile games, why bad them all?
    - jethro_tell 5y ago
      Yeah, I have a little section of no-ad kids games on my phone. There are times when it's helpful. Minecraft, a couple educational games the younger one likes, machinarium, don't starve, lost journey. I find that it's nice to say no mobile games but it's easier to fill that void with stuff that doesn't suck.
    - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
      That's for sure, not all mobile games are bad, but the majority out there (especially those pushed by stores) are bad because only those have the $$ for monetization (aka pushed to front). I guess we can always ban store access and only download the "good" ones, which is one solution that does not toss the baby out.
yobbo 5y ago
Not really true. When there was Quake and Visual Basic, we still played around with qbasic in msdos because it was fun and gave immediate feedback. I think the combined editor and runtime environment of qbasic shortened the feedback loop and made it more fun.
markb139 5y ago
A couple of years back I bought a microbit (in fact I bought two). "it's just a microchip" was the response. I think he might be a future product owner as he was more than happy to give me requirements for a simple game, but had no interest in how it worked.
resonious 5y ago
I was a lot like your friend's 11-year-old when I was a kid. I loved games, and I loved clicking around to make custom content for games, but I didn't comprehend programming. My mother at one point even installed and booted up Visual Basic for me once and I just didn't get it. It wasn't until I was 16 or 17 before I actually started seriously getting into computing. I guess some kids are "late bloomers" and some just don't have the aptitude for it.
- openknot 5y ago
  16 or 17 still sounds pretty young. In the December 31, 2020 lecture for Harvard's introductory programming course (CS50), the lecturer explains that 2/3 of the class have never programmed before [0] (most enrolled students are 18-19 years old by then, assuming the number excludes non-Harvard undergraduates who are taking the course online). I started later, and I attribute it to my parents being low-tech, and online discourse framing programming as "really hard" and something you just do to find a steady job (versus make something useful). I bet I would have started a lot sooner if I had different influences growing up, but at least there's still time to learn now. [0] https://youtu.be/YoXxevp1WRQ?t=208 https://youtu.be/YoXxevp1WRQ?t=208
zozbot234 5y ago
> I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic OTOH, "open ended ways to create" have grown as well. There's of course programming, but also office activities, desktop publishing, making simple websites. If they're interested in modern 3D games like Fortnite, they might experiment with the basics of 3D rendering and game development using something like Godot. They won't come up with the next AAA title, but simple, proof-of-concept arcade or puzzle games ought to be feasible.
hgomersall 5y ago
When I was at school in the 90s the computer room used to be full of kids at lunch time writing code in qbasic. The reason why was that was all there was to do on the machines that wasn't writing a document or making a spreadsheet. If you want kids to not play Fortnite and instead write code, take away Fortnite and leave them with something they can code on.
vanderZwan 5y ago
> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs, I did most of my Basic programming in junior high on a BBC Micro Well, I wouldn't be surprised if part of that is simply that writing a fun game in Basic is really really difficult. Actually, designing a fun game, period, is really difficult. I know I was interested in making games at a young age but I also knew I wasn't going to be able to make them in the version of Basic that I had on my DOS computer
morphle 5y ago
I would start a kid on Etoys from Squeakland.org, first show her some video demo. And show her how to script Minecraft from Etoys. Also Microblocks for hardware. Then Thonny and a $4 Raspberry pico led blinking and temperature with ADC, then have her measure her skin voltage. Then look at Squeak Morphic (Lawson English tutorials on Youtube). Indeed, maybe only 10% of kids like it. The rest should go play with World of Goo. Then the Powder Toy.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
Blender could be a good thing to get someone started in terms of programming. You can do things with it that you can't do easily with most other free or easily available software.
elevaet 5y ago
> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle To be fair, as a kid growing up in the 80s enamoured with BASIC, I didn't even want to play with the LOGO Turtle. It always seemed like the most boring thing you could do with a computer.
lolinder 5y ago
> I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _literally_ the most desirable and sophisticated "computer game" there was at the time. I think this explanation makes a lot of sense. I was that age a few years later and learned to program by building Flash games when they were at their peak. It makes me wonder if there's a way to approximate that experience today, even with how far we've come. It doesn't need to be as high fidelity as Fortnite (most of my peers were far more interested in Call of Duty than Flash), but are there simple game engines that a kid today could get started with and quickly build something that's "cool" even by modern standards? Most I'm familiar with have a huge learning curve compared to a BASIC interpreter or even Flash.
joezydeco 5y ago
Putting the Roblox controversies aside, I see kids creating entire multiplayer systems in this environment. Putting together 3D polygon models and animating them with Lua scripting. And then on top of all of that they organize themselves into systems. My son belongs to a virtual "airline" that has an org chart, schedules "flights", and has dozens of players that run the show on a daily basis. And, like any other org, you get management disputes and daily problems. I see them better trained for what comes next than we are here, sitting around and talking about it. So yeah, why would you draw circles with LOGO or blink LEDs when you can literally do all of this from an already-running desktop environment?
- ddingus 5y ago
  Roblox is crazy! I have one very interested, and I feel it's worth doing. But, I'm way out of the loop on that one, meaning it's a time sink for me too. But, maybe I just have to. Very interesting comment!
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    If your kid has the interest, they will teach themselves. That's the magic of the 'kids computer' we all get nostalgic for. Nobody taught us how to work with an Apple ][ or C64, we picked it up from books and from friends. These days the online resources are lightyears better. I say let them explore and they will find their own path. You can't force this on someone and expect them to succeed.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      No plans to force anything. She comes to me. Great. We have fun.
itomato 5y ago
Kids like having power. Computers - even old ones - give them power. Even if it's the power to say "wow, we've really come a long way, and what I think I would prefer to pursue is..."
skinkestek 5y ago
> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle, when they could be playing multiplayer games on their phone or iPad instead. My 13 y.o. girl sent me a screenshot of herself programming Python Turtle in Pycharm the other day :-)

Raminj95 5y ago

I have actually never thought of it like this, excellent answer!

tmm84 5y ago

I agree with this post. Most of the young 6-12 year olds out there aren't going to be really interested in a terminal/basic interpreter. A lot of what that audience wants to do is build mods for the games they play. Minecraft, fortnite, etc. and the like. But programming for these games is a bit more involved than regular programming obviously. I suggest getting them a computer that is capable of playing the game they like and helping them setup the environment for making mods (this is probably something young adults can do on their own but definitely not 6-12 year olds with little experience/patience). And, I think being there as the one learning it with them and understanding what is needed is going to help. I would highly suggest purchasing a book centered on minecraft modding or the like (they seem to be really popular at least the bookstore near me), as this will give you the knowledge to help your child(ren) make mods. I suggest the favorite game modding because it is something both the child and their friends will actually appreciate/use/play with.

asddubs 5y ago
minecraft modding is doable with some help. obviously more complex than writing some little BASIC program from scratch since you're hooking into existing things that are at times not ideally documented but it's a lot more feasible than trying to teach your kid unity, probably
- bmj 5y ago
  There are plenty of tutorials available out there, with some geared toward kids with no programming experience. My older son went through a class (can't remember which one...it was at least six years ago) that did a very nice job of making basic Minecraft mods very accessible, while still introducing programming topics.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    plus it's java, so it's something they can actually carry on to use in the future, rather than some proprietary custom script language with wildly different syntax than anything else. it's even got strict typing!
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  the minecraft modding experience on the raspberry pi my pre-teen has is dead simple to get working, with a quick code-observe loop, but then there's a gap moving to java mods on the PC, which is much more involved
fallat 5y ago
Modding is actually an excellent catalyst to begin the programming path or other similar paths... Great suggestion!
helen___keller 5y ago
Agreed with modding. In the early aughts my dad encouraged me to learn basic but I was more into playing games and I didn’t see the connection to basic which seemed to me to be mostly about printing text. But at some point, my favorite game involved a scriptable server engine, and nothing brought me joy like updating the game that I had poured hundreds of hours into, with a simple line of text. After that I went back to mainstream games like WoW and didn’t do anything like programming again until college (minus an attempt at AP computer science which I dropped because it was boring)

amelius 5y ago

> Don't get your hopes up _too_ high about your kids being the maybe 1% of people who choose to program for fun. Programming is mostly plumbing anyway, so if your kid chooses differently, that's very ok.

colordrops 5y ago
I sometimes think of it as interior decorating. I do a lot of frontend though.

kieckerjan 5y ago

> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs. Exactly. When I was a teenager in the 80's the kids in school came in three classes: the majority who did not know what computers were or thought they were lame, a minority who dabbled in the nascent gaming scene and an even smaller minority (of maybe 5 people in a school of 1500) that was interested in programming a computer. I happened to be part of the latter minority. The gamers were all about getting the newest (cracked) games as quickly as possible. Meanwhile we were cutting our teeth on the internals of the c64. While we were lousy gamers with zero connections, we had a certain amount of respect in the gamer community because we were actually capable of programming the intro's to their cracked games. In return we got to feed on their scraps, so there was a living in that. :-)

chalst 5y ago

Are you aware of Nintendo Game Builder Garage? [1,2] My youngest daughter was begging me to get this for her when it came out. She spent ages in earlier years trying to figure out doing stuff with the MIT Scratch offline editor. She's not super keen on text-based programming yet (my elder daughter is and solidly resists my typed FP propaganda in favour of hand-typed OO programming), but these kind of visual programming environments do teach real agent-based algorithmic concepts. I'm not saying your advice isn't better than something along these lines, but it's good to be flexible in terms of what advice you offer and be encouraging rather than prescriptive. [1]: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/game-builder-garage-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/game-builder-garage-sw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058300

vanderZwan 5y ago
Playfool recently had a nice video with suggestions on how Game Builder Garage combines really well with earlier Labo kits. So if you have any of those lying around.. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJH11qXtys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJH11qXtys
agentwiggles 5y ago
I'm vicariously proud of your children :) Out of curiosity, how old are they, and when did you start them on programming related stuff? I have a 5yo and 7yo boy. The older one is just starting to develop an interest in creating things, and recently took an unsuccessful (but still educational) stab at learning Blender.
- chalst 5y ago
  18 and 15. I started them on Scratch about 9 years ago, so your elder was about the same age as my younger when we started, and I kept coming back to its model to explain ideas about algorithms.

vnorilo 5y ago

My 7yo is absolutely thrilled by scratch on Lego Mindstorms Robot Innovator [1]. The physicality of it is engaging. Granted, I'm generally a very restrictive parent about mobile/console gaming. 1: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/robot-inventor-51515

bencollier49 5y ago
I agree with this. I think robots are probably where it's at these days. Kids sometimes like the simplicity of the old computer games, but as mentioned above, the old excitement at having your hands on cutting edge tech isn't there with a Raspi, or an old retro computer.
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
Agreed. Mobile gaming should absolutely be banned from kids. Most of the games out there were designed to be money-grabbing. Consoles are better especially if you give them a retro one as the first machine.
- mavhc 5y ago
  You mean designed to get you to pay/watch ads gaming. There's lots of great mobile games, why bad them all?
  - jethro_tell 5y ago
    Yeah, I have a little section of no-ad kids games on my phone. There are times when it's helpful. Minecraft, a couple educational games the younger one likes, machinarium, don't starve, lost journey. I find that it's nice to say no mobile games but it's easier to fill that void with stuff that doesn't suck.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
    That's for sure, not all mobile games are bad, but the majority out there (especially those pushed by stores) are bad because only those have the $$ for monetization (aka pushed to front). I guess we can always ban store access and only download the "good" ones, which is one solution that does not toss the baby out.

yobbo 5y ago

Not really true. When there was Quake and Visual Basic, we still played around with qbasic in msdos because it was fun and gave immediate feedback. I think the combined editor and runtime environment of qbasic shortened the feedback loop and made it more fun.

markb139 5y ago

A couple of years back I bought a microbit (in fact I bought two). "it's just a microchip" was the response. I think he might be a future product owner as he was more than happy to give me requirements for a simple game, but had no interest in how it worked.

resonious 5y ago

I was a lot like your friend's 11-year-old when I was a kid. I loved games, and I loved clicking around to make custom content for games, but I didn't comprehend programming. My mother at one point even installed and booted up Visual Basic for me once and I just didn't get it. It wasn't until I was 16 or 17 before I actually started seriously getting into computing. I guess some kids are "late bloomers" and some just don't have the aptitude for it.

openknot 5y ago
16 or 17 still sounds pretty young. In the December 31, 2020 lecture for Harvard's introductory programming course (CS50), the lecturer explains that 2/3 of the class have never programmed before [0] (most enrolled students are 18-19 years old by then, assuming the number excludes non-Harvard undergraduates who are taking the course online). I started later, and I attribute it to my parents being low-tech, and online discourse framing programming as "really hard" and something you just do to find a steady job (versus make something useful). I bet I would have started a lot sooner if I had different influences growing up, but at least there's still time to learn now. [0] https://youtu.be/YoXxevp1WRQ?t=208 https://youtu.be/YoXxevp1WRQ?t=208

zozbot234 5y ago

> I think the problem here is that the world has moved on a lot since some of us kids were amazed at what we could make machines like an AppleII do with basic OTOH, "open ended ways to create" have grown as well. There's of course programming, but also office activities, desktop publishing, making simple websites. If they're interested in modern 3D games like Fortnite, they might experiment with the basics of 3D rendering and game development using something like Godot. They won't come up with the next AAA title, but simple, proof-of-concept arcade or puzzle games ought to be feasible.

hgomersall 5y ago

When I was at school in the 90s the computer room used to be full of kids at lunch time writing code in qbasic. The reason why was that was all there was to do on the machines that wasn't writing a document or making a spreadsheet. If you want kids to not play Fortnite and instead write code, take away Fortnite and leave them with something they can code on.

vanderZwan 5y ago

> And, to be fair, _most_ of the kids when I was in school just wanted to play Space Invader clones and not write Basic programs, I did most of my Basic programming in junior high on a BBC Micro Well, I wouldn't be surprised if part of that is simply that writing a fun game in Basic is really really difficult. Actually, designing a fun game, period, is really difficult. I know I was interested in making games at a young age but I also knew I wasn't going to be able to make them in the version of Basic that I had on my DOS computer

morphle 5y ago

I would start a kid on Etoys from Squeakland.org, first show her some video demo. And show her how to script Minecraft from Etoys. Also Microblocks for hardware. Then Thonny and a $4 Raspberry pico led blinking and temperature with ADC, then have her measure her skin voltage. Then look at Squeak Morphic (Lawson English tutorials on Youtube). Indeed, maybe only 10% of kids like it. The rest should go play with World of Goo. Then the Powder Toy.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

Blender could be a good thing to get someone started in terms of programming. You can do things with it that you can't do easily with most other free or easily available software.

elevaet 5y ago

> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle To be fair, as a kid growing up in the 80s enamoured with BASIC, I didn't even want to play with the LOGO Turtle. It always seemed like the most boring thing you could do with a computer.

lolinder 5y ago

> I could, as a 10 or 12 year old, make something for myself that kinda looked like and was way more fun (for me) to play that _literally_ the most desirable and sophisticated "computer game" there was at the time. I think this explanation makes a lot of sense. I was that age a few years later and learned to program by building Flash games when they were at their peak. It makes me wonder if there's a way to approximate that experience today, even with how far we've come. It doesn't need to be as high fidelity as Fortnite (most of my peers were far more interested in Call of Duty than Flash), but are there simple game engines that a kid today could get started with and quickly build something that's "cool" even by modern standards? Most I'm familiar with have a huge learning curve compared to a BASIC interpreter or even Flash.

joezydeco 5y ago

Putting the Roblox controversies aside, I see kids creating entire multiplayer systems in this environment. Putting together 3D polygon models and animating them with Lua scripting. And then on top of all of that they organize themselves into systems. My son belongs to a virtual "airline" that has an org chart, schedules "flights", and has dozens of players that run the show on a daily basis. And, like any other org, you get management disputes and daily problems. I see them better trained for what comes next than we are here, sitting around and talking about it. So yeah, why would you draw circles with LOGO or blink LEDs when you can literally do all of this from an already-running desktop environment?

ddingus 5y ago
Roblox is crazy! I have one very interested, and I feel it's worth doing. But, I'm way out of the loop on that one, meaning it's a time sink for me too. But, maybe I just have to. Very interesting comment!
- joezydeco 5y ago
  If your kid has the interest, they will teach themselves. That's the magic of the 'kids computer' we all get nostalgic for. Nobody taught us how to work with an Apple ][ or C64, we picked it up from books and from friends. These days the online resources are lightyears better. I say let them explore and they will find their own path. You can't force this on someone and expect them to succeed.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    No plans to force anything. She comes to me. Great. We have fun.

itomato 5y ago

Kids like having power. Computers - even old ones - give them power. Even if it's the power to say "wow, we've really come a long way, and what I think I would prefer to pursue is..."

skinkestek 5y ago

> I genuinely don't think many kids these days want t6o spend time playing with there LOGO Turtle, when they could be playing multiplayer games on their phone or iPad instead. My 13 y.o. girl sent me a screenshot of herself programming Python Turtle in Pycharm the other day :-)